Case Study: Hiroshima University achieves flexible HPC resources and secure research billing with Microsoft Corporation Azure

Utilizing Microsoft Azure to secure and track billing for academic researchers

Hiroshima University needed to expand high-performance computing capacity for urgent research needs, but its on-premises cluster was running at about 95% utilization and could not always support new or time-sensitive projects. The university also wanted clearer billing controls, efficient ICT procurement, and better business continuity, so it evaluated public cloud options including Microsoft Corporation’s Azure.

Microsoft Corporation implemented Azure as a public-cloud HPC environment alongside Hiroshima University’s existing on-premises system, with a campus registration and billing process to track usage by researcher and instance time. The result was a flexible, scalable setup that met most computing requests without resource limits, reduced infrastructure from three racks to one in the on-premises environment, and enabled cost-optimized pay-as-you-go research computing with improved security and disaster-recovery readiness.

Hiroshima University

Koji Nishimura

Information Media Education and Research Center